The biggest mistake most marketers make is their failure to recognise the importance of communicating internally.

Customer service, brand building, relationship marketing: whatever your approach, it has to be made real by the people within your business. Too often when it comes to sharing your plans internally across all departments or aligning a master plan within the company, the act of communicating clearly and efficiently could be markedly improved. Consider this, if your employees do not know what your company’s marketing strategies are, how are they to help carry it out?
The implementation of any strategy begins by educating those who have to execute it, everyone in the company has to be informed, not just the marketing department. This is known as internal marketing and is used by marketers to motivate and empower employees to ensure customer satisfaction. The process involves extending and developing the foundations of marketing such as the marketing strategy, the exchange process and customer satisfaction models to internal employees. Such internal employees should be anyone involved in delivering value to the final customer (to be realistic, everyone) and could include marketing, production, operations, research, logistics, human resources, management, IT and customer service.
Like external marketing, internal marketing is dependent on communication, and problems arise when employees are not kept in the loop. There are three basic aspects of internal marketing communication: informing employees, empowering them, and listening to them.
Informing employees
Just as your marketing strategy incorporates various marketing communication functions and media to communicate with customers, so should your method of communicating with your staff. Similar to customers, employees have their preferred methods of receiving information. Therefore, good internal marketing makes us of various channels of communication, such as intranets, newsletters, email, bulletin boards, and face-to-face meetings with staff.
Empowering employees
Because internal marketing provides employees with information, it enhances employee empowerment, which essentially means giving employees the knowledge and resources to make decision about problems that affect customer relationships. Generally, those in the lower levels of an organisation are on the front line of customer contact. Therefore, it goes without saying that the more information these employees have, the better the decisions they will make.
Empowerment programs must be supported by training and contain information about company’s policies and procedures. A support programme with the objective to creating empowered employees must aim to inform employees about their role in satisfying customer and their role in the company’s success.
Listening to employees
Like external marketing, internal marketing is also dependent on two-way communication. If your internal communication is to have integrity, internal marketing must encourage and facilitate employee feedback. This allows management to known whether all departments understand and agree with internal marketing messages and have their support in various marketing communication programmes. More importantly, listening to employees can provide valuable real-time customer intelligence and knowledge, which in turn can be used to modify and enhance current marketing strategies.
Your turn…
Does your company have a strategy in place to keep staff informed? If so, what kinds of measure are used to ensure they have access to and understand the material provided? Drop us a note in the comments section below and share your story or tips.